It was a feelgood day. The women who served me in the Co-op wore their special outfits. And to watch an attractive woman in a beautiful dress pledging her troth to a handsome man in a great abbey is a sumptuous sight. The Church of England was one unexpected and unambiguous winner – the bishop of London managed an address that combined due gravity, spirituality and hope. It was a reminder of this curious institution's importance to the nation.

I was less certain about the royal family. The two princes looked so much like Diana's boys: it was only 30 years ago that she was doing the same as Kate Middleton. You wondered what must have been going on in Prince William's mind as his first act as a married man was to bow both to his grandmother, and to Camilla, his mother's nemesis, now occupying the place his mother would have cherished.

Of course that is part of the royal family's point: to be the longest-running and glitziest soap on the planet – and this wedding was another classic episode: the gallery of medieval-style trumpeters made me laugh out loud, but at other times the effect was touching and affecting . Commentary is thus made infinitely harder: apart from the queen, no royal warrants any real reverence, so attempts to be serious collapse into unctuous banality. Simon Schama's comment to the BBC's Huw Edwards that there were three marriages going on – between Kate and William, past and future, and monarchy and nation – for my money won the prize. There was only one marriage; given the soap the Windsors have become, to suggest that the event represented more was unhinged.

The Lancaster bomber and Spitfire flew over the BMW-owned Rolls-Royces and Volkswagen-made "useful" buses ferrying the minor royals around. The best the Brits could do was the dress. The fall from industrial grace from when Elizabeth got married in 1947 could hardly have been starker. There is, of course, an umbilical link between the flummery, sycophancy and empty titles and our ongoing economic sclerosis. Britain is not a society likely to produce either the next Google or another Rolls-Royce. But we do a good royal wedding.